ABOUT

At the time of launch, he was, among other things, doing service as a professional athlete, and, in the instances he chose to share arbitrary sociopolitical observations in 160 characters or less, around 30 000 tweople would have had their screens light up, some their faces. These are the main causal factors behind an inflated sense of self-importance.

The Administrator’s wife

Homosapiens is naturally anxious, and considering its remarkable journey, quite understandably so. Tens of thousands of years ago, the odds were stacked heavily in favour of the numerous magnificent beasts actively trying to eat its face. Anxiety amplified its awareness of these threats, later inciting a violent charge up the chain. Alas, the ascent was not gradual enough for its biology to adapt as it leapfrogged those aforementioned beasts in a matter of seconds, evolutionarily speaking.

That was a story of how anxiety is the baggage we brought along for the ride to the top of the food chain.

The fact that we could do it in the first place boils down to the extraordinary human language. We became really good at out-planning and out-communicating all the creatures we encountered, yet it is our unique ability to talk about things that do not exist in the natural world that made all the difference.

When you look at history, it’s basically the story of how things, even made-up ones, can have very real and quite enormous consequences.

Yes, our ability to collectively believe in fairy tales paved the way for our species to cooperate in unnaturally large numbers and subsequently conquer the world, but, it has left that same world overpopulated, crippled in our trail of destruction, and us, anxious as fuck, almost all of the time.

I know, two seconds ago I said we’re naturally anxious.

But modern anxiety seems to have less to do with the natural world, more with the imagined realities we’ve crafted throughout our history on our way to victory lane.

Human rights and religious rights, laws and prohibitions and commandments and rules, morals and manners, right and wrong and, my personal favourite, correctness. All things that exist solely in the shared imagination of millions of strangers, on which society is built in its entirety.

We often care more about these things and the order they maintain than we do about the fact that the Pale Blue Dot is in trouble. There’s something wrong with that.

Homo sapiens means wise man, modestly, yet the degree to which we disagree on just eating and sex is confounding.

When I say I’m unbelieving, it just means I try to look at the human experience through a lens reinforced with the three branches of science, the lessons of history, a bit of logic and common sense, and none of the surrounding bullshit.

I guess you could say I’m in pursuit of liberty from anxiety. I want to do human well.

But most importantly, I have one on the way, and I’m still figuring out what I’m gonna say to her, about it all.